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News

August 7, 2017

If you’re thinking of driving to work or classes at UC Berkeley on Monday, Aug. 14, getting around and parking is going to be, well… a bear. A big, congested Golden Bear. But you can help make the day better for yourself and others on campus.

August 3, 2017

This massive storm system, which was found in a region where no bright cloud has ever been seen before, is about 9,000 kilometers in length, or one-third the size of Neptune’s radius, spanning at least 30 degrees in both latitude and longitude. Molter observed it getting much brighter between June 26 and July 2.

UC Berkeley is hosting a two-day conference Aug. 16-17 that will bring together farmers, doctors, patients, environmentalists, consumers, nonprofits, community leaders and scientists to discuss potential applications of CRISPR technology, ranging from human and animal health to agriculture and conservation.

July 31, 2017

The University of California yesterday filed its opening brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., in support of its appeal of the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) decision in the CRISPR-Cas9 interference.

Marian Cleeves Diamond, one of the founders of modern neuroscience who was the first to show that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment, and who discovered evidence of this in the brain of Albert Einstein, died July 25 at the age of 90 at her home in Oakland.

July 24, 2017

UC Berkeley researchers have discovered how Cas1-Cas2, the proteins responsible for the ability of the CRISPR immune system in bacteria to adapt to new viral infections, identify the site in the genome where they insert viral DNA so they can recognize it later and mount an attack.

With one eye on potential bioterrorism threats, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today announced $65 million in funding to seven projects around the country – including one led by UC Berkeley – to improve the safety and accuracy of gene editing.

July 19, 2017

Chicken skin may provide tips on how to grow artificial skin for grafts that looks like normal human skin, complete with hair follicles and sweat pores. Just the right tension on growing skin could set up these organized structures without the need to add chemicals to trigger them.

July 14, 2017

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded UC Berkeley $21.6 million over four years to create a window into the brain through which researchers — and eventually physicians — can monitor and activate thousands to millions of individual neurons using light.

July 12, 2017

Research now shows that the countermeasure viruses came up with — inhibitory proteins referred to as anti-CRISPRs — can be used to improve CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene-therapy tool, decreasing off-target gene editing that could cause unwanted side effects.

July 6, 2017

University of California, Berkeley officials have offered freshman admission to more than 15,500 high school students for the 2017-18 school year. And more offers were made to first-generation college students and underrepresented minority students than in 2016-17.

A new study by Chinese and American biologists shows that if the calamity had not wiped the planet clean of most terrestrial life 66 million years ago, 88 percent of today’s frog species wouldn’t be here. Nearly nine out of 10 species of frog today have descended from just three lineages that survived the mass extinction.

June 27, 2017

Mice, unlike cats and dogs, are able to move their whiskers to map out their surroundings, much as humans use their fingers to build a 3D picture of a darkened room. UC Berkeley researchers have for the first time reconstructed the whisker map a mouse creates of its surroundings in order to navigate its world, catch insects and avoid cats.